Bobbing and Weaving to Focus my Specs on the Sign Warning me of the Aggressive Dog.

Bobbing and weaving to focus my specs on the sign warning me of the aggressive dog that will “definitely bite” I step backwards into a pile of shit.

On the rare occasions that the cold swirling wind dies down it’s quite warm. The cloud cover is not particularly thick, just thick enough to keep the sun from getting through. The wind is whistling through the plastic topiary of the Burton bubble. The innards of the steel lampposts chime against their casings. “Good morning!” Shouts the man in the puffer jacket who is walking a small dog. “Good morning!” I shout back as the fine mist of rain slowly coalesces on the lenses of my glasses and the jackdaws hide away in the belfry.

The life-sized plastic gorilla at the school house now has a baby gorilla sitting on its knee.

I follow the dotted white line of bird-shit that shadows the phone wire and continue up the hill past the apple tree with the shadow of mouldy yellow windfalls.

Above the roof tops in the village, a pair of crows are giving a big red kite a hard time. Directly below them, a man wearing a black gilet and grey jogging pants climbs into a Daihatsu Terios and drives away.

The wind finally dies away and the weather brightens. The couple in gilets who are looking in the window of the sweet shop have been reading out the labels on the jars to each other for about five minutes.

Young whippets, John and Trevor have tied their owner’s legs together with their leads next to the Peugeot 308 with the flat tyres. The big woman who is eating from a polystyrene container with her fingers is laughing at them from the bus stop.

Consecutive windowsill dioramas: 1. Two 4” high models of Castle Hill tower either side of a model of an African elephant of a similar height. 2. A 3” high brass pig (Berkshire?) 3. 12” high ceramic Egyptian cat. 4. Two 4” high ducks wearing Edwardian costume and a slightly taller statuette of Tobermory from the Wombles.

Donna Summer’s Dinner With Gershwin is playing across the shop floor at the Co-op. A man in black combat pants is inspecting a jar of hoisin sauce. He looks very disapprovingly at it, scowling angrily before tossing it into his basket and wandering off up the aisle singing. “I wanna have dinner with Gershwin. I wanna watch Rembrandt sketch. I wanna talk theory with Curie. I wanna get next to you. Next to you, yeah yeah”.

In the office, Adam was telling us about the curries he'd eaten over the weekend

In the office, Adam is telling Nathan about the curries he's eaten over the weekend:

"Balti Friday night, Pathia Saturday night and on Sunday I went round to a mate's house and we had a nice Rogan Josh. Not a bad weekend."

“Blimey, I bet you're back on the fruit now! Mind you, I suppose they're not too bad for you, curries, are they?" Says Nathan.

"Depends what you fire in with ‘em, doesn't it kid?" says Adam without looking up from his work. He’s standing on a box slotting letters into the top row of his frame (he's not particularly short but he says it makes his arm ache otherwise).

A red kite (the bird kind) drifts along the tree line above the road as the woman with the picture of an alien on her sweatshirt approaches with her two boxer dogs. As she gets closer, the dogs snarl and bark at me. Without looking up, the woman shouts "Shut up! It's a man, not a Martian!"

I slip on a flight of greasy green Yorkstone steps. I end up at the bottom, lying on my back with my feet on the patio, slightly winded. I tell the owner about it. "Are they slippy?" he says and hands me a mis-delivered letter from the day before.

At one of the sheltered bungalows on the estate, the old woman with the grey perm, faded blue anorak and american tan tights is putting out her wheelie bin. It’s decorated with a large stripy orange and green sticker that said Pimp My Bin! in a graffiti style font.

On my way down to the farm, I see a freshly killed blue tit in the middle of the lane. On my way back up five minutes later, it has gone.

Someone has written ‘Retard’ in the dirt on the side of old Mr Richardson's new Honda CR-V.

A rabbit runs across my path in the same place as one did yesterday.

On the estate, a boy of about five is playing on a scooter in the street. "Are you going to my house?" He asks. "Yes" I say and he throws down his scooter and runs inside shouting "Wait there!" Moments later, I see him through the window of the front room wrestling an agitated Jack Russell terrier from the back of the settee. A door slams and the boy comes running back outside. "It's our dog" he says, "I had to lock him in, he hates postmans”.